Word: rothenberger
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...Rothenberg's huge-scale images are powerful and benign...
...often, and particularly not in the paintings from 1979 on, when glimpses of the human face and body start appearing in Rothenberg's work. These are bluntly autobiographical, fragments of depression that crunch a lot of extreme feeling into a very small figurative compass. They are miserable figuration, sparse in detail, almost resentfully so, but piercing in their plainness. They bear no relation at all to the general run of '80s Neo- Expressionism, which was overblown, self-dramatizing and almost industrially repetitive...
Instead they reach back to the earlier and more authentic anxieties of Alberto Giacometti. Some depict vomiting heads, which, as Rothenberg puts it in her catalog interview with Auping, were "divorce images," conveying "a sense of something threatening, like a stick in the throat . . . the whole choked-up mess of separating from someone you care for and a child being involved." Her combined face-hand images, like Red Head, 1980-81, are particularly strong, perhaps because they so vividly combine a sign for openness and approach (the human countenance) with one for rejection or warding off (the open palm thrusting...
Generally, Rothenberg seems to be at her best in paintings that combine a single image with anxious focus. In the later '80s she became preoccupied with a different, atmospheric style of painting and images of dancers (including one of her aesthetic heroes, the painter Piet Mondrian, imagined solemnly doing the fox-trot with a Rothenberg-like partner). In their cold, flickering, indistinct light, one catches long-distance echoes of Impressionism and of the sequential-position photography that was once copied by the Italian Futurists. In these, as in the drawings from this period, form is extremely provisional -- the shape...
...Rothenberg's latest work, done since she moved to New Mexico, is even more diffuse than these and rarely seems to cohere well -- apart from a change in technique (she uses a palette knife now, after watching local workers troweling adobe), she has not yet figured out how to deal with that immense landscape. But these are early days, and Rothenberg has a gift for mulling over diffuse impressions and suddenly pulling them together in one piercing image of near hieroglyphic force. A recent example is Blue U-Turn, 1989: an androgynous body, huge in scale and bent into...